Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

February 29, 2008

Just need the new information on the web? Then look at Gigablast, which has just updated to provide a 'freshness dating' method of limiting results to the last day/week/month/year/custom or off. They also have a comparison option for GYMA as well.

Nice idea, but I'm not convinced as to its effectiveness. I did a search for australia search engines and it pulled up my Australia search engines page, but I've updated this a few times since the version that they have cached. They are reporting that it was last modified on Feb 4th and cached on Feb 12th. The Ask version of the page was cached on Feb 22nd, as was the Google version. MSN cached it yesterday and had the most recent version. This really rather leaves Gigablast lagging rather a lot...

Google Sites is the new incarnation of Jotspot, which they bought some time ago. This was a wiki-like resource, and Google sites is designed to build on that. The overview looks very interesting - you can create pages with single clicks, no HTML required, upload files, use their templates and so on. All the usual stuff in fact. Looks good so far - where do I start?

Well, I click on the 'compare editions and sign up' and choose the free, premier or education editions. Slight concern here - Google Apps can 'meet the needs or different organizations'. But I'm not an organization, just a person. Still, lets press on shall we? Go for the freebie. Next screen is all about signing up for Google Apps. Can't I just, you know - create a site in seconds, the way that I can with PBWiki or Wetpaint? I'm now being asked about domain names. Hmm, time to call on the help function. This one is a cracker... 'Signing up for Google Apps (already own a domain name)' OK so far, and then we get...If you already own a domain name that you want to use with our
services, we can skip all the domain name registration steps. We can
fast-forward to setup, but make sure that you have access to the DNS
settings for your domain. If your domain host doesn't allow you to
customize your MX and CNAME records, you won't be able to activate all
the services available with Google Apps.

What?? Thanks, that's going to be really helpful isn't it. I can really see that going down a bomb with people who want to use 'the easiest way to make information accessible to people who need quick, up-to-date access'. Going to Pageflakes and creating a Pagecast is making information easily available. Creating a Wetpaint/Squidoo/Zimbio/Wiki page/site is an easy way of doing this. So, basically this is just for an intranet, and not for a regular person then? Could they not have said that at the outset, or is it just me being dense here?

If they seriously think "Anyone can do it. Building a site is as simple as editing a document, and you don't need anyone's help to get started" they really do need to re-read their help screens.

[Edited to add: If you're still keen to try it, David Rothman has created a test area on his website that he is prepared to let people have access to - check out his post on Google sites (which he is more in favour of than I am)]

4,000 search engines you’ve never heard of. This is the title of an article that I wrote for Alt Search Engines about country and region based search engines. In the article I look at the current state of play for country based search engines, numbers, the correlations or lack of them related to number of engines per country and size, political leanings, standard of living and so on. I also look at why you might want to choose a country based engine over one of the more traditional ones.

February 26, 2008

Picanswers is an interesting resource, and for once I'm not entirely sure which category I should put it into. Basically you post a photograph of whatever it is that you need information about and you ask your question. Examples that I looked at were questions on a symbol found painted on the floor in a house that looks as though it may have been plumbers instructions, a query regarding a 'gadget', a picture asking if the object is a toothpick or a skewer, what a Japanese symbol means and so on. It's a really interesting site and I suppose if pushed it would come into the Questions and Answers type service/search engine.

A few days ago I wrote about Spokeo; a resource that pulls in content from your contacts, irrespective of their name - it'll go out and start collating information in a rather scary way. There are a few other resources that are doing the same kind of thing: Second Brain is a social content aggregator
that helps people collect, organize, search and share content from multiple online
services in a single library.

Iminta (what are your friends inta?) is still in invitation mode only, but appears to work on the same concept as Spokeo. You tell Iminta the various social networks where you have accounts
(delicious, flickr, YouTube, Lastfm, etc.) and the service creates a
master list of everything you are up to on those sites. Your friends
can then subscribe to your master feed, and/or you to theirs.

Finally we have Friendfeed which collates content from 28 different social networking sites:

I can certainly see the advantages of these resources, and it's fair enough that they just show what information your friends choose to make public. However, the fact that these things can find out details about individuals as they appear in different places and draw it all together in ways that the original 'owner' of the information had not considered as a possibility is a concern. There is also of course the point that some people are not as sensible with their personal data as perhaps they should be.

Edited to add: Pandia has picked up on the Spokeo story, calling it the "'Big Brother' of social networking." They're as concerned about it as I am, and I absolutely agree with their point "Browsing all the info Spokeo makes available to me feels a lot like
spying on my friends. And they don’t even know I’m keeping track of
them." They also end up by saying "Warning: We don’t recommend that you provide third party services like Spokeo with the password to your online email account."

If you're thinking of dipping your toe in the water, take a look at some of the examples; there's some great ideas in there. Creating a Pagecast (a shared page) is a really simple and easy way to share information quickly with colleagues and users, to answer specific queries or questions and generally to keep up to date.

Ask has been doing some good stuff recently, particularly with their Binoculars option. Previously you could just run your mouse over them and you'd get a thumbshot of the page. Now, as a result of a tie up with Compete we get more statistics, such as the number of visitors to a site. This can be really useful when it comes to deciding which sites to visit, or how authoritative they are (with the obvious point that lots of visitors does not a good site make) very quickly. I've got a screenshot below which is two images into one, so that you can see both options available.

There are other search engines that offer thumbnails of course, such as Exalead and sites that offer statistical information, such as Alexa but this is a really neat and effective way of bringing all that information together.

Via Brian's site I got to an article in XiTi Monitor regarding the latest statistics for Firefox use in Europe. The good news is that it's still growing with an increase of 2% in the year to December 2007. Estonia is up to 37.3%, while Finland still leads with 45.4%. Very sluggish in France, 25.8% and Spain 21.5%, with Britain continuing to lag behind on 17.2%, just above Ukraine 16.6% and the Netherlands with 14.7%

This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. A great many of the places that I visit (to the extent of about 80%) when I'm teaching are still using Internet Explorer 6, and we've not even got to IE7! A great many people have never seen Firefox either, which is even more depressing, although most have now at least heard of it. Not doing anything is the easiest option of course, and why bother to upgrade when IE6 is apparently working well? Forgive the cynicism here, but when tech. support people are blocking access to a wide variety of new applications they're hardly likely to embrace a new browser - far too much work for them.

I don't somehow think this is going to attract them many new clients. I did ring them last week and told them about it, but the person who is in charge of their website was away for the day. Interestingly, the person I spoke to said 'Yes, we've seen this before' and didn't express any great surprise! Given that no-one rang me back to say 'thanks for pointing this out' I thought that I'd share it with a wider audience and use it as an example as to why it's always important to check the results you get in search engines and why you need to have, and to keep, total control over your own website.

I've just been looking at Play Audio Video, The Multimedia Search Engine and it's not bad. Provides 3 types of data - audio, video and images. When you're viewing audio you don't get the entire thing straight off - just a quick thumbnail preview. There are links to the home page for the item, you can play it from the search engine itself, and obtain more information on the item. I'm slightly concerned in that there's not much by way of videos - Trooker is an engine that gives you much more, though to be fair it's just a video search engine. PlayAudioVideo does however give you a nice opportunity to look at varied content. If this could be included in a standard engine this would be really helpful.